Talk:Lambert W function

Article Checklist for "Lambert W function"

Workgroup category or categories	Mathematics Workgroup [Editors asked to check categories]
Article status	Developed article: complete or nearly so
Underlinked article?	No
Basic cleanup done?	Yes
Checklist last edited by	Fredrik Johansson 07:35, 28 April 2007 (CDT)

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What's missing?

I think this article is fairly complete. I'd like to flesh out the history section a bit and perhaps add one or two more examples of usage. Obviously, there is a lot more that *could* be said, notably about the complex branch structure; but that topic might be overkill for an "introductory" article. What do the rest of you think? Fredrik Johansson 08:42, 28 April 2007 (CDT)

I was not previously familiar with the W function, but I read and enjoyed the article and didn't find a single error of grammar or anything else I could change. Looks excellent to me. Better than the Wikipedia article, at least in some ways: yours is easier to read and understand and has more text, and flows more smoothly, as good Citizendium articles are supposed to. Your graphs (here and at logarithm) are better than the Wikipedia ones. --Catherine Woodgold 21:05, 28 April 2007 (CDT)

Too few people are familiar with it. Consider this article a propaganda piece ;-) You say "at least in some ways"; in which ways is the Wikipedia article better? It mentions a few other formulas; is there anything else? (And thanks again for the praise.) Fredrik Johansson 21:10, 28 April 2007 (CDT)

I said "at least", leaving open the possibility that there are zero ways in which the Wikipedia article is better. Skimming them both just now, the only thing the Wikipedia article has that this one doesn't have, it seems to me, is colourful graphs of the function in the complex plane (but on those graphs, the labels and the numbers on the axes are small and hard to see, so I don't know whether they do much besides look impressive.)

I may not have read everything in this article carefully (yet). For example, I'm not sure I understand this part: ...but faster convergence is obtained by taking the initial value from an interpolating function around 0 for small arguments and a few terms of the asymptotic series for large arguments. Does this mean that for small arguments, you use values on both sizes of zero to interpolate to get a starting value, and that for large arguments, you use a different formula first (the asymptotic series or Taylor series, given in the calculus section) to get the starting value, then apply the iterative formula? --Catherine Woodgold 21:26, 30 April 2007 (CDT)

Yes, that is the intended meaning. I should clarify that part. Fredrik Johansson 12:04, 1 May 2007 (CDT)

Maybe it's OK as it is, anyway. It's just rather terse so at first I had the impression that I didn't understand it, but after studying it for a while I figured out what was meant. Or maybe I still wasn't quite sure. --Catherine Woodgold 16:55, 1 May 2007 (CDT)